BY SARAH STEPHEN
Fifty Australasian Correctional Management guards at Port Hedland immigration detention centre ended a 12-day strike on October 6, after reaching an agreement with ACM management on increased staffing levels during day and night shifts.
Media coverage of the strike highlighted the guards' claim that detainees were stockpiling weapons. No evidence of a weapons stockpile was produced. According to Paul Asplin, an organiser for the Australian Workers Union, detainees had fashioned weapons from broken-up steel and wooden beds, bookshelves and "anything [they] can lay their hands on".
Explaining that strikers were demanding a weapons search before they would return to work, Asplin added: "We've also asked for the assistance of the state police in the search, and for all those weapons to be photographed so the public of Australia can see what's happening inside these detention centres."
A statement by the WA Refugee Rights Action Network (RRAN) pointed out: "ACM understaffs the centre, makes everyone work really hard and is generally just your typical exploitative, profit-driven private enterprise. But the guards, instead of taking a stand against ACM, have scapegoated the refugees."
In the early hours of October 7, police and ACM guards stormed the rooms of sleeping detainees to carry out the third search for weapons in two weeks. RRAN reported that "officers tried to remove chairs, tables and light-bulbs from the cells, [for] what appears to have been purely ... agitational purposes... They claimed that detainees were sharpening metal bed legs to use as weapons. The detainees said they knew nothing about this... Two previous searches of all the rooms and cells had been carried out and not a single weapon was found."
In another early morning raid on October 9, ACM guards locked detainees out of their rooms for the entire day. Three men were put in isolation cells, then transferred to other detention centres.
The Inside Port Hedland web site (<http://www.porthedland.nomasters.org>) reported that an Iranian man was wrongfully identified by ACM staff as a "ringleader" during the last weapon search. He was handcuffed and put in solitary confinement after an argument was triggered when the detainee asked the guards why they were scapegoating refugees in order to get better working conditions. The guard responded: "Because all of you are criminals."
On October 7, the day the ACM guards returned to work, detainees began a work and hunger strike. The detainees demanded the replacement of racist ACM guards and more paid jobs for detainees in the centre. By October 11, Inside Port Hedland reported that the detainees ended their strike, having achieved their demands.
Allegations of bashings, racist taunting and provocative behaviour by detention centre guards are widespread. In a case currently before the Port Augusta magistrates court, three former Woomera guards are accused of bashing a 13-year-old Afghan boy last December.
The guards have gone missing and federal authorities have failed to locate the men. According to the October 5 Melbourne Age, "Federal Police have apparently not vigorously pursued the matter; a senior immigration department bureaucrat told a Senate committee that the assault never took place and then withdrew the claim; and South Australian child protection authorities have refused to act on complaints".
"A former ACM employee who worked with the men and is familiar with the case said there was a 'mates club at Woomera' that would ensure that former guards were kept well hidden. 'They will make it hard for the police to find them, they are very much into protecting each other no matter what the circumstances'."
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.